change fat32 to ntfs?

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kateylou

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Hi, some of you may recognise me from previous thread 'Trouble installing Windows on a new HD.'

Through the help and guidance of a few TS angels, I have my computer up and running but it is a little unstable……

To get it going I had to install windows XP professional using the FAT 32 file system

Now I want to know what (if any) is the value of changing it over to NTFS and if I should be doing this then how……(I wonder if FAT32 is the cause of my stability issues??)

(I feel a little like the high school computer teacher refer to in many “quotes” as I don’t even know the difference between the two!)

PS I did search TS for this information first but am still a little lost

Thanks heaps for any suggestions / comments

Katey
 
There is certainly value in changing over to NTFS. The most immediate value is in security, in that with FAT32 your documents cannot be secured, and will be able to be read with just a simple doot floppy in dos. With FAT32, you have all the account options, but none of it is really all that secure. Using NTFS, file and folder permissions become a whole lot more effective. The next most obvious value is that FAT32 has a partition size limitation of 32GB that NTFS does not, and FAT32 cannot support HDDs of more than 127GB. FAT32 also has a 4GB filesize limitation, which NTFS does not

here's a primer on the benefits of NTFS over FAT32... http://kadaitcha.cx/ntfs.html
 
thanks spike, have checked the site and followed links to a step by step instructions on how do do it! thanks!!!!
Katey
 
I found out about it the hard way when i had one hard drive NTFS and the other FAT32. I couldnt transfer a file that was just over 4 gigs. And it seems to me i also had problems with quite a few file names, if i recall i couldnt move them to the fat32 drive without renaming the files. Im going back a few years but i am pretty sure that was the case.
 
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